Lynn Redgrave on Theatre
Star of 2008's My Dog Tulip on Chekhov, Shaw and Shakespeare
Lynn Redgrave on her favorite theatre productions of all time. Watch for her in animated feature My Dog Tulip with Isabella Rossellini and Christopher Plummer.
In the final installment of this five part series, Lynn Redgrave, who has recently survived breast cancer, chats about her First Love, the passion that continues to keep her going, and will likely keep her going for many years to come.
You’ve done theatre, film, television, radio theatre, video. Do you have a preference?
My first love is the theatre, theatre … live theatre. It is where I began and it is where I will end, if one day I have to end. I love working for a camera – I find the challenge of that a completely different sort of challenge and I do love it. But if someone said to me well, you can only carry on for the rest of your life in one medium, and it can’t be the theatre, then I really would feel just devastated. But if I had to lose any of the others – as long as I can have the theatre, I think that would be okay.
There's something about living on the knife's edge. That curtain’s going up and you must be ready and there is no second take. There is a second night of course, but there is no second take. All energies have to come together and the challenge of that completely different animal that is made up of all those different beating hearts every night. It's always a different proposition every night and every place you play.
When it all comes together, it is so exciting and of course it doesn’t totally come together in that thrilling way often enough for you get blasé about it.
What is the most thrilling production you have ever been in?
I loved particularly Bernard Shaw’s Saint Joan, which my husband directed in Chicago and also on Broadway in the late '70s. Then I was in a production of The Cherry Orchard by Chekhov – directed by Tom Moore at La Jolla in California. That was an absolutely mesmerizing production. I adored that play. I was also in a production of Three Sisters with my sister Vanessa – tremendously exciting.
Going back to an early Shakespeare, an exciting production which I only had a small part in it – I was in Franco Zeffirelli’s production of Much Ado about Nothing which was at the National Theatre in London.
By God that was an exciting production. People loved it or hated it. Audiences flocked to it.
On the opening night it was so controversial and you know how po-faced the British can be about anything non-traditional – although they have got better about it, but in those days they weren’t. They were still purists. You must only present in one and often quite boring manner.
Zeffirelli took it and turned it all into this extraordinary Sicilian theft. There were people who adored it and on the opening night screamed Bravos, which is very un-English, because they don’t normally get up and scream. But at the same time there were equally vociferous people booing, and that to me is a hit.
You really like Zeffirelli's vision?
He can make a stone act. He gets such passion and such humour and such wonderful things into his productions and that was pretty damn exciting I must say.
What’s your favourite Shakespearean play? You must know them all so well…
I think Twelfth Night because that’s the play that made me want to be an actress. This particular production was directed by Peter Hall at Stratford England and I saw it 17 times and I have since played Viola three times and because it was what inspired me to be an actress – I would have to put that top of the list.
